The Human Species

Marta Zelwan

Artwork by Elephnt

Not too long ago, a child was born that was so ugly, with a face so horrific and wrinkled, with eyes so bulging and without eyelids, with fingers so froglike, and scales covering its entire body, that the story showed up in newspapers. Our cows have stopped producing milk, the people said. I was afraid it would lunge at my throat, said one nanny. There have only been fifty such instances recorded in medical history. The baby’s mother didn’t want him. Fear and disgust is human nature. Finally, one of the nurses took him in, and now they whisper that she’s emotionally underdeveloped, has she run out of money for bread, is that why she brought such a monster under her roof? You can hide everything, but a face is the hardest thing to hide. They say that it didn’t come from God, this being. As if any of them could say with certainty what a human or an angel or a she-angel looks like.

The plastic surgeon says it’s true, you can hide everything to a certain degree, even a hump, but everyone needs to have a face. To have, therefore to be. To have it written on your face, that you belong to a species. The human species is important. Just the fact of it. A person must hold on to her face even over the telephone, even in the falling dusk. A face determines reality, even if it’s largely a work of the soul. This has something to do with names, last names, mirrors, with endocrine-genetic and paranormal phenomena. And also with the Woman with a Crow, whom I saw at the crossroads. She didn’t have a face. She was silent as a ghost. Whoever asked her anything didn’t get anywhere, only got lost.

And now, in a dream, an invisible woman is teaching a man how to be more human. She hands him a plate with two round cookies with faces: two sweet, glazed faces with noses, eyes, and lips. The man is not allowed to touch them, much less eat them. Over the telephone, someone half-conscious, naked or drunk, makes an ironic comment. Then the woman takes the cookies and a dust rag, and wipes their faces off with a couple thorough strokes. If this is how it’s going to be, there isn’t going to be anything at all. The faces disappear along with the entire dream, with the cookies, the people, the planet Earth: they disappear one word at a time.

translated from the Polish by Victoria Miluch

Read the original in Polish

“The Human Species” is a fragment from Marta Zelwan’s book, Śnienie (Dreaming). The book is entirely made up of such fragments, which revolve around the speaker’s dreams and the tension between the waking and sleeping worlds they spur. Each fragment functions as a unit unto itself, as well as a part of a unified whole. Read individually, the fragments are measured and contemplative, imagistic and surreal, and peppered with humor of the absurd. Taken together, we start to notice the speaker’s obsessions and the threads that tie the dreams together. We begin to recognize characters and events that the speaker returns to. The fragments are constantly questioning their truths, considering an image or idea through and against associated images, literature, religions, histories, and the everyday. 

In translating, one of my main objectives was recreating the precise balance between sense and the surreal in Zelwan’s sentences. Figuring out how to translate prose guided by a shadowy dreamlike logic—to translate mystery buttressed by a kind of cagey linguistic clarity. 

Śnienie was originally published under Marta Zelwan’s former penname, Krystyna Sakowicz, and was nominated for the Nike Award in Poland in 2001.

Marta Zelwan is a Polish writer based in Warsaw. She has published nine books, including collections of poetry, prose, and essays. Two of her books have been nominated for the Nike Award, Poland’s most prestigious literary award, and she has won the Iskry Press Prize, the Literature Foundation Prize, the Stanisław Piętak Prize, and the Edward Stachura Prize, as well as the Culture Foundation Prize. Her most recent book is Graffiti, a collection of poetry.

Victoria Miluch is a fiction writer and translator. Her stories have appeared in such publications as Passages North, The Southeast Review, and The Adroit Journal, and her translations can be found in the Denver Quarterly. She currently lives in Poland, translating Polish literature on a Fulbright fellowship.